Mobile First Is
Performance First
Stephanie Hobson!
If you could only do one
thing to prepare your desktop
site for mobile… [make] the
desktop site blazingly fast.
blog.cloudfour.com/first-thing-you-should-do-to-optimize-your-
desktop-site-for-mobile
Jason Grigsby
Slow load time is cited as
the most common issue
experienced when accessing
a website or application.
e-commercefacts.com/research/2011/07/what-usrs-want-from-
mobil/19986_WhatMobileUsersWant_Wp.pdf
85% of mobile users expect
sites to load at least as fast
or faster than sites on their
desktop
www.strangeloopnetworks.com/resources/infographics/
web-performance-and-user-expectations/mobile-device-
users-expect-sites-to-load-fast
40% of people abandon a
website that takes more
than 3 seconds to load.
blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time
Your Desktop Site is Slowing
Your Mobile Site Down
guypo.com/rwd-2014
www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/03/
build-fast-loading-mobile-website
www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/03/
build-fast-loading-mobile-website
Code Your Mobile Site First
Content!
• Critical content

- Article? Product? 

- Sharing? Comments? Ads? Mega menu? Sidebar?!
• Images

- gradients

- SVG

- background

- compressive images

- srcset

CSS!
• Defer or Inline!
• Fonts

- Do your mobile users need them?

- FOIT vs FOUT
JavaScript!
• Progressive Enhancement!
• Defer and async!
• Be picky
The First 14KB !
Are The Most Important!
chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch02.html
Download speed is not the
bottleneck. The bottleneck
is the network latency.
www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/03/
build-fast-loading-mobile-website
Johan Johansson
chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch10.html
1000ms - 14KB!
The Guardian!
• The Guardian

- speakerdeck.com/patrickhamann/building-
theguardian-dot-com 

- www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI
The Guardian!
• Content

- only article, no comments, sharing, related/popular
articles, not even ads.!
• CSS

- critical CSS inline in the head, ajaxed into localstorage

- no web font on first load, FOUT, webfontjson!
• Javascript

- only loaded by modern browsers that “cut the mustard”
People Smarterer Than Me
• Patrick Hamann

- speakerdeck.com/patrickhamann/building-theguardian-dot-com 

- www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI !
• Paul Irish

- http://goo.gl/Lw8IAX !
• Scott Jehl

- “Responsible Responsive Design”!
• Ilya Grigorik

- “High Performance Browser Networking” (Free online!)
I like to make websites
everyone can use
Stephanie Hobson!
stephaniehobson.ca!
@stephaniehobson!
Testing Your Code
• Waterfall

- Network panels

- webpagetest.org!
• Slow connection

- Tether

- Chrome DevTools

- webpagetest.org film strip view

Mobile First Is Performance First

Editor's Notes

  • #6 Amazon's 1 second = $1.6 billion /year. Google 4/10s = 8 million fewer searches per day Search ranking
  • #7 Mobile is growing
  • #8 Alexis top 10,000 using RWD. Smushed. Bytes per pixel.
  • #9 Display:none and visibility:hidden on iPhone 4.
  • #10 Stylesheets with MQ on iPhone 4.
  • #12 3 problems: content, CSS, JS. Identify critical rendering path add rather than subtract. This is hard (alphabet)
  • #13 mobile content = critical content
  • #14 CSS is render blocking. Penthouse and Critical CSS
  • #15 https://twitter.com/mootcycle/status/438016755706101760
  • #17 Work with JS turned off. Cut the mustard, yep/nope.
  • #18 1954 by Roger Bannister 46 days
  • #19 4 minutes = 14KB = the enemy here is latency Latency, 14KB, packets
  • #22 This is why we combine http requests (sprites, mega CSS).
  • #23 What if I told you… render
  • #24 OMG seriously, I want to put this code in an art gallery.
  • #27 Is possible: content, css , js.
  • #31 network panels, simulate slow connection, webpagetest.org